Calcine – Common Love Common Nausea (2024)
If there is a music that is well placed to perfectly transcribe the filth, the urgency, the daily suffocation of lower Paris life, it’s Paris hardcore. With an active, teeming scene (S/O: Worst Doubt, Deviant, Headbussa, Reclaimed…) an identifiable sound: namely its sharp and radical guitars tones, a sticky groove imbued into hip-hop, mosh-parts that make you no longer perceive where the danger from, and a heavy 90’s metallic sound, which can earn these bands the well-felt label of “street death” so well accompanied by the pair of air max on-fleek that goes with it.
| By Nino Futur
Calcine are no exception to the rule, and offer us a vile and uncompromising music. After a first demo in 2022 with metallic hardcore/death metal accents almost as amiable as a racketeer on the way out of the RER, this time they did it again!
This time with a redoubled effort in terms of frontal assault through “Common Love Common Nausea” the combo’s first album released by the English label Church Road Records and Out Of Thunes Records.
Introduced by an old-school rap track “Attack to win”, the beat is dirty, the snare drum viscous, nothing lies here just to set the atmosphere of the album: streetlife.On the microphone, it is a real dragon that Stef the singer embodies, so much does this raw voice spit its flames directly through our ugly mugs whithout anti-pop.
With a pure 90’s flow suddenly recalling the scream-rap diversions of Jamey Jasta from Hatebreed on the album “Pre-fix of Death” by Necro. We will note a second interlude rap track all in French on “Des vies à Bout” on a beat by Djamhellvice (from the band BXII cf Karton #12) echoing all the victims of police violence and mutilated protesters.
For the rest of the album, everything goes as expected: 18 minutes of relentless throat-grabbing, where the pressure only increases on pressure layers, from the very punk “23:11” to the almost Beatdown outbursts of “Back to Fight” through death metal ambushes like on the finale of “Target”, Calcine may play the executioners, there is that little something extra called : groove.
Here, the brutality and the filth emanating from the compositions would only be less if the entire rhythm section were not so skillfully chiseled, the dancy-bouncy hip-hop groove, often very present in hardcore metal genre, is here more powerful than ever.
“Target“, “Autopsie“. The perfect soundtrack to make all the B-boy goblins coming out of the sewers of northern Paris and do the dome. From the crazy hi-hats of “23:11″ to the spicy salsa sauce riffs of “Amnesic” to the final total war atmosphere riff of “Parasite“, Calcine have just signed a little masterpiece that is unmissable for any fan of the genre, and which can offer a very nice gateway to all the curious people of this microcosm that is hardcore.
With lyrics that are still invested in the goal of scrubbing the eternal filth under the nails of our humanity, namely: uniforms of authority, the increasingly uninhibited fascist medias, sexist and sexual assaults, animal exploitation and the parasite that is human for the human race. With roughness and radicalism, Calcine have delivered to us this year a true condensed version of inspired and combative hardcore in the image of its artwork signed by Lazygawd, current reference of the punk airbrush style.